Debates Reveal Soviet Union`s Bitter Divisions

MOSCOW -- The Soviet Union on Friday struggled to give birth to a new kind of government in a process that laid bare bitter divisions of class, geography, nationality and outlook.

After a day of haggling, the Congress of People`s Deputies adjourned late Friday night to a voting chamber with fine-print ballots listing 600 names, from which they were to select a 542-member legislature called the Supreme Soviet.

In a move that some members said would tend to make the new legislature more staid, the Congress refused to exclude full-time Communist Party and government officials from the body.

Self-styled progressives in the 2,250-member Congress had pressed for a rule requiring legislators to give up other jobs. They said that would make the Parliament more professional and independent of the Communist Party apparatus.

The proposal mustered 636 votes despite the opposition of President Mikhail Gorbachev, one of several signs that the Congress, which held its inaugural session on Thursday, was growing steadily more self-confident.

In a country where unanimity has been the political norm, the clash of ideas, televised live from beginning to end, is a crash course in self- government.

An even more sizable minority, 831 members, voted on Friday morning to suspend a law limiting demonstrations after some asserted that the police had broken up a gathering of citizens trying to meet with deputies on Thursday night.

The Moscow City Council later agreed to open up an area near the Luzhniki sports stadium for unrestricted public assembly while the Congress is in session.

After an extraordinary televised cross-examination by the members on Thursday, Gorbachev was elected president by the Congress, the supreme governing body and the first Soviet assembly in more than 70 years whose members were mostly chosen in competitive elections.

On Friday the Congress turned to what many consider its most critical task, selecting a Parliament to govern a country that, for most of its history, has been united primarily by the brute power of the Communist Party.

The exercise quickly became a lesson in the powerful stresses set free by the loosening of the autocracy -- the hostility of the Soviet provinces toward Moscow, the cultural gap between workers and intellectuals, the aloofness of the Baltic republics, the animosities and grievances of ethnic minorities.

On Friday night, members from the Baltic republics of Lithuania and Latvia, many of whom openly declare that their ultimate aim is complete independence from the Soviet Union, threatened to boycott the election of the legislature.

Although each region was allowed to chose its own quota of deputies for graduation to the legislature, the Baltic members objected because the final list was subject to approval by the entire congress. The abstention of the Baltic deputies would cast a shadow over the credibility of the new legislature.

``I would say we have a crisis situation,`` Gorbachev said.

Roy Medvedev, a historian respected in the Baltic republics for his exposes of Stalin`s terror, implored the rebellious deputies: ``Be reasonable, and don`t destroy the huge amount of work that has already been done to democratize our society.`` Late Friday night, the Baltic deputies seemed to have relented.